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Adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) within Indian enterprises will take-off once the prices of devices come down, a senior executive from global software product firm SAP has said.
Diane Fanelli, Senior VP & COO, platform solutions SAP, who was recently in India to interact with the company's customers to understand their roadmap on IoT, said: “Customers do want to be there but it's still at pilot level. Some of this is because of device cost. So some are limiting the implementation. As the cost of sensors and devices come down the adoption will go up,” said Fanelli.
IoT, as explained on Wikipedia, is network of things or physical objects embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity so that these objects can exchange data with the manufacturer, operator or other connected devices.
Fanelli says that even for SAP the adoption of IoT has meant changes in the way the company would engage with stakeholders.
“What is required here is a different partnership that we never did before. We need to work with device manufacturers, connectivity providers etc. This is not an area that SAP is into or wants to get into. Today we are partnering with other vendors in the marketplace to really have end-to-end partnership,” she added.
To solve the IoT paradigm for customers, SAP has taken a platform approach rather than build applications.
“We figured out that we need to provide customers a platform for IoT. A platform where they can build their applications. We are using our Hanna Cloud platform as the basis for this and helping customers to leverage it. We will have some applications that are already used cases like connected logistics, predictive maintenance, and connected manufacturing. You will not see us do thousands of applications. We have done a lot of work in the past 12 months to come out as a platform of choice,” she added.
One of the examples of IoT in India has been the flood monitoring system. The UP government has used SAP's HANA Cloud platform to monitor, analyse and predict floods. The system is being implemented with Bangalore-based Arteris Technologies. The company in a pilot earlier this year deployed 1,000 sensor points from four major river basins to collect data.
Globally, Harley-Davidson is an example for IoT delpoyment using SAP's HANA platform. The bike manufacturing company claims to be able to manufacture 25% more bikes as the time for custom-made bikes has come down from 21 days to just six-hours. This is by using SAPs connected manufacturing concept, along with use of robotics.
